Few would have bet that the story finally knocking the McCanns and the banking crisis off the front pages would be the departure of a football manager, a profession known to have the job security of a suicide bomber. Jose Mourinho, though, has confirmed his self-description as "the special one" by having his departure reported at a level generally reserved for prime ministers. In a way previously achieved by few players, David Beckham being the prime example, Mourinho is seen as a figure whose attraction expands beyond football.

In fact, he was even better equipped than Beckham to achieve what is known in politics as big tent appeal. Although aspects of Mourinho's character became visibly more unpleasant during his three years here - he clearly is to self-love what Alexander Portnoy was to self-abuse - he has attributes which win him the support of numerous constituencies.

If you saw Mourinho in a restaurant without knowing his profession, you'd assume, from the stubbled tan, rumpled hair and odd sense that a personal lighting assistant follows him around, that he was a movie star. And, if he had been, he would have been one of the few to be equally adept at silent films and talkies.

The frowns, pouts and shrugs on the touchline revealed him as a master of mime, while his verbal skills brought to football a poetic sensitivity in a second language to which only Eric Cantona ever before came close. Before what turned out to be his final game at Chelsea, a standard management lament about players being unavailable through injury was expressed by Mourinho through a metaphor about the different varieties of eggs available in supermarkets which, if spoken in an American independent film, would earn the screenwriter comparisons with early Quentin Tarantino.

As one of the few remaining senior managers in the British game still prepared to give after-match comments to the BBC (others sulking over a Panorama about corruption in the game), Jose could speak this stuff by the metre, winning the fascination of football's new post-Pavarotti middle-class fans in a way that Beckham was never going to manage without the transplantation of a new brain and larynx. (Although the weakness in this theory was that Mourinho's presence was underwritten by the ruthless Russian money of Roman Abramovich.)

Another part of Mourinho's appeal was that he stood as an example of national advancement. Just as many people who usually find motorsport boring are following Lewis Hamilton's formula one title bid because they're pleased by the idea that a young black Briton could be in this position, so Mourinho brought a shimmer of continental wit, intelligence and mystery to a sport in which the default vocabulary has been blokey prose.

A further significance beyond sport is that Mourinho's rise and fall are a study in power relationships which could be taught in any school of politics or business.

Even by recent footballing standards, it seems ludicrous that a manager could be permitted to leave after winning the league title twice in three years, but Mourinho is just the latest to discover that, although vast sums of money are made and traded in football, it is not a normal business, in that results mean nothing. And, above all, the game proves that, in any organisation, the crucial calculation is where the power truly lies rather than where it seems to be.

At a Buckingham Palace garden party, the manager of Chelsea, the editor of the Times and a cabinet minister might speak to Sir Richard Branson on a presumption of equality but, among the four of them, only the tycoon has power within his own control.

While it's impossible to feel very sorry for Mourinho, for whom a multimillion payoff and rapid employment elsewhere now await, the job of a football manager is extraordinary in that greater power exists both above and below. A disagreement with either the owner or a star player - both of which Mourinho seems to have suffered - can make the so-called boss's achievements meaningless.

For a man whose career has excited such media interest, it seems fitting that the two best analogies for what has happened at Chelsea come from newspapers, another business which, like football, ignores the usual industrial rules. Andrew Neil, despite his remarkable success at the Sunday Times, seems to have alienated Rupert Murdoch by the level of his public profile, and one reading of this unprecedented defenestration is that Chelsea had become Brand Mourinho rather than Brand Abramovich.

And, at the level of psychology rather than honesty, Mourinho has a lot in common with Conrad Black. The Canadian's mistake was to behave like a proprietor when he was an employee, and the Portuguese manager strutted like the boss when he was only the manager. At Chelsea, the job of special one had already gone, contested by the owner and several of the players. His successor needs to write in big letters on his desk: football is not a normal business.

God, we'll miss him, though. Maybe he could be persuaded to do the press conferences after other manager's matches.